Run by our Captain of Synchronous Sessions, Todd Conaway, the sessions have fallen into a Thursday pattern. Although originally envisioned as question and answer sessions for POT Cert Class participants, or maybe even a training or how-to opportunity, the fact that more experienced people tend to join has transformed the format into something more exploratory. The past few times people have shared sites they’re working with, in particular those focused on collaboration, mirroring what we’re doing in the sessions. As a result, we have spent several hour-long sessions following each other into various collaborative environments and trying things out together in real time.

Image cc E. Chris Lynch on Flickr

But sometimes we’re awfully silly. Maybe it’s the Google Hangout moustaches, or the way we all go into somewhere and one (always one) of us can’t get the damn thing to work, or the serendipitous arrival of people we’ve heard of but never met. Maybe it’s how I can say, “I don’t know if this works on a smart phone” and everyone whips out their phones to try. We all have our little foibles (Ted won’t do anything Facebook; I won’t do anything that costs money). Anyhow, it’s quite fun.

Other failed ideas included: FERPA t-shirts that say “It’s OK – I am not doing this in records maintained by the school”, having everyone pitch in for one Livescribe pen and mail it around, and actually reading instructions on a $6 bar of salted chocolate. We were enchanted by Scott’s use of a fancy radio microphone that made him sound wonderful despite the early hour in Japan, and he contributed a site for transcribing mp3 for captioning if used in Chrome.

We’ll do it again — all our distributed activities like this are posted on the … Distributed Activities page at the class site. The class is open, the synchronous sessions are open — won’t you join us?